Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.

Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.

What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?

I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.